The fountain:
The fountain was built by the Northwest Terra Cotta Company and was intended for Denver's City Park. After being rejected by the City of Denver it was accepted by Fort Collins and installed at the site of the towns' new power plant in 1934.
Over 100 photos were used to capture the fountain. Since my model was symmetrical I got to cheat 3 sides.
Tip- Photo modeling is a wonderful resource but it's not without some limitations. Capturing a model of this size is best done in parts. Don't expect to get back a perfect model in one go. Still, the 123D cloud service is pretty amazing considering its price (free).
Shoot your model in indirect lighting. If the sun is less than cooperative try batching the pictures with the Shadow/Highlight adjustment in Photoshop. This can help to make them more uniform, and un-clamp them a little.
These are typical of the open edges that you will have to fix. The hardest part about this particular build was the back and forth between Max and ZBrush. In an itty bitty nutshell: I re-meshed the 123D geometry in Zbrush piece by piece, and then exported a low res copy of these back to Max. From there I INSTANCED them around. Still in Max, the final step was to replace the low res instanced geometry with the detailed Zbrush counterparts by "attaching" them to together. Delete the low poly element(s) and you're done. Admittedly, this back door approach isn't pretty and you're way might be better... but it works.
A more thorough explanation of how I re-mesh my models for print is described in part 1 of this article:
https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=16672 &start=0&
Conclusion:
Once the final sculpting detail was completed I added the base and cut an escape hole that runs the length of the fountain.
I darkened these photos to illustrate the detail. You can clearly see the very thin walls of the shelled model. Considering the overall height of 4.5" I though the print turned out ok. If I was to try again I might juice up the engraving a bit. Cleaning the model (after these photos) helped as well.
About. Jody Garrett is the managing Arch Viz guy at The Neenan Co. in Fort Collins, CO.